Osper Service Update 06/07/2017

Osper Cards are now up and running as normal. As a parent, you can now load money onto your children’s Osper Cards. As young people, you can spend money in shops, online and withdraw money as normal. We want to let parents and children know that all money was safe and secure throughout today’s incident.

Unfortunately, we experienced a technical issue for a few hours on Thursday 6th of July, as a result parents and family members were not able to load money onto Osper Cards, and children could not spend money online, in shops or make cash withdrawals.

We know that families around the country rely on Osper. Due to a partner outage, we’re truly sorry that Osper was not able to work in the simple, safe and empowering way that it normally does. We worked relentlessly with our partner to correct the issue as quickly as possible.

As a small growing company, we need to rely on a handful of partners to deliver our service. Today, we were let down by one of these partners (our card processor) facing a major technical problem.

If there is any way in which we can cover the inconvenience you have faced today, please email us on support@osper.com and let us know.

Below is more information on the issue. If you have any questions, please email us on support@osper.com or give us a call on 0203 322 9090.

What caused the issue?

The problem today was caused by one of our technical partners having issues with their computer systems. This partner is called a card processor. We are reliant on them to manage the loading, spending and withdrawing of money on Osper Cards. They service millions of cards around the world.

Every banking service has a card processor, and some banks build their own. In our case, as a young growing company, we rely on a third party to provide this service. Building this service is complex and takes time.

Our partner rarely has these issues. Whenever they do, we have normally been able to resolve the issue very quickly with little impact to our customers.

However, today we faced a longer technical disruption from this partner. We are still working with our partner to identify the exact cause of the issue.

What will we do next?

There are three things we plan to do next:

We will be speaking to our partner to better understand the exact cause of the technical issue and what they are doing to address the cause

Within Osper, we will be discussing what else we could do as a team to support children and parents in case this happens again.

We will be communicating what we have found out back to parents and young people on this blog.

You may have noticed that this is not the first time that this kind of issue has occurred; this is certainly something that we will be raising as an additional point with our card processor.

Finally, we want to thank all the Osper Families for their continued patience and support. As always, we remain open to your feedback and suggestions.